EDITORIAL: Manitobans reject taxes to boost poor

Most Manitobans may want government to spend more to help people climb out of poverty, but according to a new Probe Research poll, very few want to pay the higher taxes to finance it.

The poll, commissioned by the group Make Poverty History Manitoba, found 59% of respondents support the idea of government spending more to provide income supplements to the working poor and to those on welfare. The poll suggested $670 million – the equivalent of raising the PST by more than two percentage points – would be enough to ensure no one in Manitoba lived in poverty.

Probe claims 150,000 people live below the “official poverty line,” although there is no official poverty line in Canada. Rather, Statistics Canada uses several different low-income measurements to gauge the number of households living at low-income levels. None are referred to by StatsCan as the “poverty line.” StatsCan studies have also shown the majority of people living below the low-income cut-off measurements are only there temporarily and don’t require government subsidies to reach higher income levels.

Either way, while 59% of Manitobans appear to support the idea of government spending more to help people climb out of poverty, few are willing to pay higher taxes to fund it. Probe suggests it would cost on average $700 per taxpayer to finance $670 million in new annual expenditures. Only 8% of people said they would be willing to pay $700 or more.

Another 8% said they would be willing to pay $500 a year. And 24% said they would support a $50 to $200 tax hike. However the majority, 60%, said they wouldn’t support any level of tax increase at all.

Manitobans don’t want to see government borrow more, either, to finance the proposed initiative. Only 3% of respondents said they support adding to the provincial deficit and debt.

So while a small majority of Manitobans like the idea in principle of government spending more to help people climb out of party, very few people want to pay for it.

There are reasons for that.

Firstly, Manitobans are already heavily overtaxed. They pay among the highest income taxes in the country and were just hit with an increase in the PST a few years ago. They probably also know that simply throwing more money at a problem rarely, if ever, results in positive outcomes.

When push comes to shove and Manitobans are asked to hand over more of their money to fund such a proposal, they reject it.

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